Internet

Please don’t spread misinformation: Part 2

This entry was posted in Commentary Writing and tagged ethics Internet on by

A few weeks ago, I discussed the mostly innocent spreading of misinformation through jokes and satire. A person on Mastodon said I should have called them lies, but a lie means intent to deceive. A lot of widespread claims start without malice. That seems to have been the case with the story of Haitian immigrants stealing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. It now appears to have started with a Facebook post that posted a garbled version of a neighbor’s claim without expecting anything significant to come of it. Others picked it up, embellishing it from vague stories they’d heard or from their imagination. Another source was claims of immigrants poaching on waterfowl, which may or may not have been true but is in a far different category from killing pets.
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Please don’t spread misinformation 2

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged ethics Internet on by

Someone I know posted an alleged quotation from J. D. Vance. Most of it was a real quotation, but the last sentence was made up. It proposed something which I don’t think Vance or any other major candidate has proposed. I didn’t think it was much more bizarre than what he has actually proposed. Since it had no attribution, I tried looking it up. It didn’t take long to establish that if Vance had ever said the last sentence, it wasn’t in that context. I replied that it was fake news, assuming that the poster had picked it up from somebody else.

He responded that the supposed quotation was a joke, and his referring to Vance as “Jack Daniels Vance” was supposed to make that clear. It didn’t for me, and I think it wouldn’t have for many other people. It’s common on the Web to make mocking alterations in people’s names while saying true things about them.
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Surgeon General wants compulsory warnings on the Web 1

This entry was posted in Censorship Commentary and tagged censorship Internet law on by

Threats to freedom on the Internet keep popping up. The latest outrage is a proposal by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to compel social media websites to deliver a warning of “potential mental health harms.” He doesn’t claim that social media have been scientifically shown to damage mental health; rather he says “social media has not been proved safe.”

What would it take to “prove” them safe? When the burden of proof is shifted to the negative, people can make unlimited claims of possible harm, and the defenders must somehow show these arbitrary assertions are false. Murthy has even cited lack of evidence as a cause for panic.

He has asserted that the situation is an “emergency.” In other words, he wants Congress to rush the decree through without debate.

Compulsory speech is, except in limited cases, a violation of the First Amendment. Freedom of speech has to include the freedom not to speak. Americans may not be compelled to pledge allegiance to the flag or to recite a prayer. Forcing website owners to say “We haven’t proven our site won’t harm your mental health” is an outrage.
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I’ve been blocked by W3C

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged Internet w3c on by

You wouldn’t think I’m important enough for the World Wide Web Consortium to worry about my reading its posts. Well, not really the W3C, but whoever runs its Mastodon account. Access from my Liberdon account is blocked, following my disagreeing with their statement that access to information is a “basic human right.” Prior to the block, they had responded to my comment by suggesting that I should not follow their account. Humans who question their views don’t have this right, apparently. It doesn’t cause me any trouble; as the link in this paragraph shows, it’s trivial to get around the block. The hypocrisy is just amusing.
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Silent movie update

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged Internet music silent movies on by

Presenting and accompanying a silent movie a month on Twitch hasn’t worked out as well as I’d hoped, so I’m making a couple of changes. I’ve also added a silent movie schedule to this website. Feel free to bookmark it or link to it.

First, I’m moving to YouTube. While I’m not thrilled with attaching myself too much to Google, it looks like a better choice than Twitch. There’s little live music anymore on Twitch; it’s mostly gaming, DJs, and talk. It pushes content creators toward a weekly schedule, which isn’t practical for the stuff I do. YouTube is a more popular choice for live concerts, not to mention Ben Model’s silent film watch parties. In experimenting on YouTube, I’ve found some other advantages. Twitch doesn’t support private test runs; I’ve already done one on YouTube to work out the details of streaming with OBS Studio. YouTube lets you post links to events in advance, which I find very nice. Finally, YouTube livestreams stay up indefinitely if I want them to.
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